At a glance
Publicly launched: 2019
Headquarters: Berkeley, California
Technology: Noncanonical amino acids made using directed evolution for use in pharmaceuticals
Founders: Frances Arnold, Tina Boville, and David Romney
Funding or notable partners: Over $20 million from investors including Spero Ventures
When Tina Boville started her postdoctoral research with Frances Arnold at the California Institute of Technology in 2017, she did not plan to develop that research into a start-up. But as she presented her work at conferences, the market for it became obvious.
Arnold is most famous for her work in directed evolution, which won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. It mimics natural selection, but on a much faster scale and with much more intentionality because scientists apply evolutionary pressure to force enzymes to evolve to perform useful jobs. In Boville’s case, she and a fellow postdoc in the Arnold Lab, David Romney, were able to direct enzymes to synthesize noncanonical amino acids, or amino acids beyond the 20 that are encoded in living organisms’ DNA.
